The Bright Side of Coding

This is well shown in the new book Coders. That I highly recommend.

The does not describe the dark side of coding, that also exists. This posting attempts to remedy that.

Allow me to state my qualifications for writing this.

I got into Computers in the Eighties, when I owned the first transportable computer, the Kay Pro, It had a tiny screen, two 5 inch floppy drives, and a keyboard. It ran the CPM operating system. When you folded up the keyboard, it had a handle you could carry it with. It was a heavy monster.

I was a technical writer at the time. I wrote my manuals on my Kay Pro. saved them to a floppy drive, and took the drive to our word-processing gals, that had their own computer. This saved them a lot of time, because they did not have to read the hand-written text provided by the other writers.

I also had a dot-matrix printer, the latest thing at the time. It printed each character is a matrix of dots. It was slow and noisy. but could print everything - text and images.

It was obvious that software was running all this, so I started learning the C programming language, and got pretty good at it.

I was working in the same room with the programmers, and showing them my stuff. They hired me as a programmer, right off the bat!

They had a minicomputer that lived in its own room, but provided terminals for each programmer to work on. This was the beginning of networking.

This was a great start, but the company soon went out of business!

To make a long story short, I worked in every county in Southern California. Ventura county, Las Angeles county. Orange county, and San Diego. The traffic kept getting worse, so I moved to Silicon Valley, just when the Internet was born.

I was right into another boom, this time a huge one! This was follow by a bust, just as bad.

I got out, and moved to Costa Rica, where I still live.

I will describe the Dark Side of Coding in another posting.